Ebola: DR Congo outbreak not slowing, MSF warns

Medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said on Friday that "the race to contain the Ebola disease outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is far from over." 

MSF issued the comments after DRC's government and the World Health Organization (WHO) had both spoken of signs of slowing transmission in some places earlier this week, prompting some relatively upbeat headlines and coverage. 

The outbreak, which was first declared in mid-May but likely started spreading several months earlier, is the largest in DRC's national history and the fastest-spreading on record anywhere. 

Did Ebola start spreading before officials even knew?

What did MSF say about the outbreak and its spread? 

MSF — which has around 1,700 staff in the DRC, most of them Congolese — warned that while the observed spread was slowing in the initial epicenter of Ituri province, the number of new cases being recorded had not fallen on a national level. 

"Assuming the outbreak is under control because some Ebola treatment centers are admitting fewer patients would be a mistake," MSF's emergency coordinator in DRC Anthony Kergosien said. 

"The outbreak is not shrinking, it is moving: South Ubangi has become the seventh affected province, while North Kivu now accounts for nearly half of all newly confirmed cases, with test positivity rising sharply in recent days," Kergosien said. 

He added that undetected chains of transmission had already taken hold in the worst-hit areas, and said "the spread of the outbreak into new areas with even weaker preparedness and response capacities poses a serious risk." 

Which factors helped DRC's worst Ebola outbreak spread so fast? 

The deadly virus has killed more than 3,500 people from more than 7,200 confirmed cases since the outbreak was declared in May, according to WHO figures. 

Based on the recorded data, the quality of which is gradually improving with the passage of time, the 2026 outbreak is the fastest-spreading in history.

It's also the largest in the DRC's history, second in overall size only to the West African outbreak of 2013-2016. The West African outbreak needed around two and a half years to reach a caseload of more than 28,000, not four months to pass 7,000.

Congo's Ebola crisis: Fear, mistrust and a growing outbreak

Many of the cases have been concentrated in hard-to-reach areas in DRC's north and east long plagued by instability, poor health infrastructure and a series of armed groups.

Medical staff strikes have also contributed to problems fighting the spread, as have dearly-held funeral and burial traditions that pose the risk of post-mortem transmission as people bid their loved ones farewell.

The outbreak also involves a rare Ebolavirus strain, Bundibugyo, meaning that existing treatments and vaccines — several of which are prohibitively expense by the standards of the region anyway — were untested and of uncertain value against it. 

Edited by: Zac Crellin

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